How To: Make “Associate” the default action for work items

I’ve heard this one a lot lately from many people, so I felt it was time to share more broadly. While there is no way to do this in the UI in TFS 2010, there is a registry key that we added late in our release cycle to allow users to configure the default work item association.

To make “Associate” the default action (instead of “Resolve”), set the registry key “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\Behavior\ResolveAsDefaultCheckinAction” to “False”.

FWIW, in our next release, we’re fixing this experience so that you won’t need to hack the registry to change the behavior.

The registry hack seems to no longer work in VS/TFS 2012 RTM (same steps as above, swapping in "11.0"). Have not heard about anything new for "fixing the experience". Did the fix make this release? What's the status? We're currently stuck with no proper fix and no working hack either. 🙁

Sorry about the long wait. It seems that adding the work item to the in progress work in the My Work tab sets the appropriate status (associate). Adding the work item to the Related Work Items in the Pending Changes tab however does not (it sets the status to resolved by default). Maybe this is expected behaviour?

I updated both VS 10 and VS 11 keys, and ran devenv /setup (for both VS 10 and 11 versions of devenv) to no avail and restarts VS 2012 to check.

Agreed with Chris….this is kinda annoying. Is there a solution to this in VS2012?

It works exactly like joshka describes….this isnt quite good enough. All my developers use pending changes to checkin, so items on our scrum board gets accidently moved to "closed" because, they accidently select resolved, when they really only wanted associate….

Is there any update on this issue? We're also having same problem on my team as we check-in from Pending Changes… and then we have to incur the wrath of the irate Scrum Master when the TFS burn down is messed up.